In the migration history literature, the number of marriages between newcomers and the native population is considered to be the ultimate litmus test of the integration or assimilation of migrants. However, little attention has been paid to how the state has actively intervened to prevent such marriages. The premarital counselling for mixed marriages provided by Dutch state officials, in cooperation with churches and NGOs, represents one such intervention. It mainly targeted Dutch women marrying Muslim men, and until the 1990s it was informed by stereotypes about gender, class and race that intersected with religion. Counselling Dutch girls about Islamic family law served as a way to demonstrate how intrinsically different ‘the other’ was. Ultimately, premarital counselling was about the power of regulations of mixture in shaping identities and producing ‘race’, linking it to sex, gender and family formations.

Kerreen Reiger‘The coming of the counsellors: the development of marriage guidance in Australia’Journal of Sociology23:3 (1987) 375–387; Kristin Celello Making marriage work: a history of marriage and divorce in the twentieth-century United States (Chapel Hill 2009) 3.

In the1910sthe French Ministry of Interior issued a notice discouraging French women from marrying Chinese men. Xu Guoqi Strangers on the Western Front: Chinese workers in the Great War (Cambridge 2011) 150–151.

On 1 January 12014the Dutch Bureau of Statistics recorded 169949 mixed couples of “autochtone” men and “allochtone” women and 104718 mixed couples of “autochtone” women and “allochtone” men including married and unmarried couples. “Allochtone” is a Dutch policy term referring to a person who has at least one parent born abroad.

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Lucassen and Laarman‘Immigration intermarriage and the changing face of Europe’55.